August 24, 2011
Charting the history
If you were to trace the long and twisting road that community enterprise has travelled over the past thirty years, it is inevitable that you would come across John Pearce at many points on that journey. One of the sector’s serious thinkers over many years, John has recently retired and all his papers, along with those of CBSN, are being donated to Glasgow Caledonian University to form a national archive. They’re keen to attract further papers and documents
Charting the history
Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) and CBS Network are delighted to report that a special collection on social enterprise has now been handed over to the GCU library. The collectionincludes archive papers and documents on Community Development, Community Enterprise,
Social Enterprise and Social Accounting and Audit which have been assembled by John Pearce throughout his working life. To these have been added the Community Business Scotland archive of papers and reports from 1981 onwards.
For the past thirty five years John has played an inspiring and pivotal role at the heart of the community and social enterprise movements in Scotland. His retirement has provided a unique opportunity to create this Social Enterprise Collection (Scotland) at GCU.
The field of this collection is wide. It ranges from the early Scottish roots of community business in the urban west of Scotland to the establishment of development units throughout the former regions; from the founding of the Scottish Social Enterprise Coalition to the spread of self-help structures for evaluation and reporting on social, economic and environmental performance; and from the Community Co-operatives in the Highlands and Islands to community economic development projects in India.
The collection ties in with the new Masters in Social Enterprise course being run at GCU in partnership with the Social Enterprise Academy. It also has clear and useful cross-sectoral links to related fields of interest. Once catalogued, it is planned to make it more widely accessible, beyond university users.
The next step is for CBS Network and GCU to work together to attract funding for an archivist to sort and catalogue the collection. An initial sum of £30,000 will be sufficient to jump start this work.
The two organisations are now keen to attract further papers and documents that will contribute to this becoming the leading reference point for the history and future development of policy and practice in social enterprise in Scotland and beyond.
For more information contact Alan Tuffs 01506 87 33 55 or alan.tuffs@btinternet.com 9th August 2011